Top Expert Tips on Government Event Management: DPRK-USA Summit Perspective

“Business, labor, and political organisations are the top three industries with a demand for event planning,” states Brandon Gaille in hisarticle on event planning statistics. Because politics is all about communication and debate, it makes sense that government is so strongly tied to the industry of meetings and events.

Have you ever wondered how organising a trade fair is different from setting up a government event? Clearly, in both cases, an organiser must be armed with a checklist, a reliable system for guest registrations, and onsite personnel. With government meetings, however, chances are that you’ll have to work in an overly demanding setting where security and automation are of paramount importance. So how do you ensure that you don’t bite off more than you can chew?

A few months ago, the GEVME team had a stunning opportunity to test-drive their expertise in the context of the buzziest political meeting of the year. The DPRK–USA Summit, informally known as the Kim–Trump event, took place in Singapore in June 2018. Powering a government event of such complexity was both a huge honor and a challenge for GEVME, but in the end, the team nailed it…and so can you.

With all of our lessons learned, we’d like to share some of the expert tips provided by GlobalSign.in’s Customer Success Director, Daniel Gerard Tjan, and the company’s CEO, Veemal Gundagin.

Below you’ll find five fundamental aspects that defined team success in the context of the DPRK–USA Summit along with the best tips from our interviewees:

Certification

By speeding up the process of compliance, you have more time to focus on important organisational tasks. No matter the size of a government event, it’s always aligned with a huge variety of security practices and mechanisms. Accordingly, when an organiser hires a technology vendor, the first thing that is done is a compliance check, which can be very time consuming. For the GEVME team, no precious time had to be wasted:

“As a company, we are ISO 27001 certified. So that in itself comes with the whole checklist of controls and measures that we have within the company and within the product. The certification became an important testament of security measures that we could put into place.”

– Veemal Gundagin, CEO of GlobalSign.in

Takeaway: Give preference to event tech vendors that own internationally or locally recognised certifications. This will help you avoid a whole range of compliance procedures and testing.

Integration

At first glance, it might seem that powering a government event with an audience of 5,000+ people requires hundreds of minds and twice as many hands. Not only do you have to keep each administrative process under control but setting up a system that is reliable and secure also takes lots of work. Having software for government event management that aligns all the necessary tools—from the registration platform to reporting solutions—is a huge benefit here.

“When you are using a SaaS platform with integrated apps, you get a number of benefits straight away, including security out of the box, the best practices in terms of data protection, and simplified management of large data sets.”

Risks averted

Whatever event experience you’re planning to undertake, risk assessment should always be part of the game. Only when you are aware of the threats and know exactly where they could be coming from can you actually guarantee a seamless execution. For the DPRK–USA Summit, the GEVME team developed custom contingency plans based on high, medium, and low risks that were all identified through testing.

“To cater to the worst-case scenarios, our team came up with different contingency plans related to the failure on infrastructure, system, and venue. In general, we had at least two contingency plans for each scenario.”

– Daniel Gerard Tjan, Customer Success Director at GlobalSign.in

Takeaway: Make sure that you have at least two backup plans for handling each ongoing issue that could arise during the event.

Specialised staff

The most ideal preparation doesn’t exclude the possibility of something going wrong on the big day. If there are a multitude of security mechanisms and systems involved, it’s especially important to have specialised personnel onsite.

“There were two types of specialists who had to be present onsite at all stages of the event. These were technicians—people familiar with our product—and, of course, onsite specialists—those who were specialised in knowing exactly how to use the product.”

– Veemal Gundagin, CEO of GlobalSign.in

Takeaway: Technologies can solve many issues, but you still need individuals who can manage technologies properly to ensure a smooth execution.

Role playing

One more peculiarity of government events is that they are often powered by groups of volunteers: canvassers, interns, or students engaged in the activities of local authorities. This means that the onsite team might need to do lots of volunteer trainings before the event. Obviously, a lack of time for proper training can be a big risk in this case.

“A big part of our onsite staff were volunteers. So in terms of training, we had to activate the experience of onsite technical specialists to put the newcomers on track as quickly as possible. Even though the timeline was very tight, we managed to pack all the practical lessons into training sessions, which were essentially based on role playing.”

Conclusion

The prospect of having to work with a high-stakes client such as government can be frightening. However, this can also be a great way to test the collective expertise of your team and the reliability of the services you are offering. Hopefully, these five insights will help you overcome your fears so that you can step right into the challenge with the perfect level of preparation.

GEVME is the fully integrated platform that makes your event lifecycle happy. With advanced apps for each event management process, the platform helps you craft a custom event toolkit. Request a DEMO to experience the automation of website development, online registration, onsite check-in and related services.